I.
You're going to die. Maybe in sixty years. Maybe ninety. Maybe tomorrow. Nobody knows. But the clock is running.
And between now and then, you get to decide: are you going to exist, or are you going to live?
Most people exist. They wake up, move through routines, collect paychecks, scroll feeds, watch shows. They exist.
They had dreams once.
Then they chose the fallback. The safe job. The practical path. The Plan B that slowly became Plan A. They chose comfort over uncertainty and called it wisdom. Called it being responsible, being smart, being realistic.
But here's the truth about fallbacks: they don't exist.
II.
Think about what a fallback actually is.
You have a dream. You want to build something, become someone, change something. You say, "I'm going to try this, but I have a fallback." Sure. You absolutely have a fallback. But what are you falling back to?
The answer: giving up.
That's all a fallback is. It's the thing you retreat to when the path gets hard. When doubt creeps in. When you're exhausted. When that voice in your head starts whispering that maybe you're not good enough, maybe this won't work, maybe you should just play it safe.
The fallback isn't protecting you. It's guaranteeing your failure.
Because if you have a fallback, you're already divided. Part of you is committed to the dream, but another part—maybe the louder part—is scanning for the exit. You can't be all in. The fallback won't let you.
Let's be specific about this. You get some money in the bank. Okay, that's a financial fallback. You have runway. That's different. But what about your dream? What about the thing you actually want to build or do or become?
A financial fallback and a dream fallback are completely different things. The financial cushion gives you time. But the dream fallback—the "if this doesn't work, I'll just do X instead"—that kills the dream before you've even started. You've already decided that when it gets hard enough, you're going to quit.
Look at the people around you who kept their fallbacks. The ones who said doing something real was interesting, nice to have, but never essential. Where are they now? The fallback won. It always wins. Because that's what it's designed to do.
III.
We have limited time on this planet. Sixty to ninety years if we're lucky. Some of us less. And you can spend that time in one of two ways: you can exist, or you can live.
Existing is easy. Follow the path. Kindergarten, school, university, job, a few years of fun, family, kids off to college, a couple vacations per year, decline, death. The regular rhythm. Autopilot.
Did we evolve for hundreds of thousands of years just to do that? To move through life on a predetermined track, never deviating, never building the thing we actually wanted to build?
Every single person has an obsession. Maybe a micro-obsession, but it's there. A musician you wanted to become. An artist. A cause to live for. Something you wanted to create. A different way you wanted to live. It's in you.
And what happens to it? Most people give their souls to work that was never the dream. They say, "I need a fallback." And then they're 30, 40, 50, 60. The dream didn't disappear, it just became too painful to look at. So they stopped looking. They rationalized. "It wasn't realistic anyway. I made the smart choice. I was practical."
But late at night, alone, they know the truth. They chose the fallback. And the fallback chose their life for them.
The ultimate test of whether you lived well is simple: Do you wake up with regrets?
Regret is different from other emotions. Sorrow, rage, anxiety, pain. These are present-tense. They hurt, but you can do something about them. They exist now, in the moment.
Regret is the only emotion that exists entirely in the past. It's the gap between what you wanted and the reality you're living. It's looking back and saying, "I wish I had tried. I wish I had been different."
And there's nothing you can do. You can't go back. The only thing worse than failure is never trying at all.
That's regret. That's what you get when you choose the fallback.
IV.
So what's the alternative?
Going forward. Not as a strategy. Not as a backup plan. Going forward as the only option.
When you eliminate the fallback, something changes. Your focus sharpens. Your commitment deepens. You stop dividing your energy between the dream and the exit strategy. You stop being one foot in, one foot out. You're all in, because there's nowhere else to be.
This is where you discover what you're actually capable of.
If you stumble, you don't retreat. You pick yourself up and keep moving forward. If you fail, you don't run back to safety. You learn, adjust, keep moving forward. If you're exhausted, afraid, uncertain, you keep moving forward. Because there's nowhere else to go.
The only fallback is going forward.
Think about what this actually means. The fallback isn't a place you retreat to. It's not Plan B. It's the act of continuing. It's picking yourself up from whatever just happened and moving toward what you want to build. That's the fallback. That's the only fallback that exists.
This isn't about being reckless. This isn't about ignoring reality or pretending consequences don't exist. This is about understanding that the biggest risk isn't trying and failing. The biggest risk is never trying at all.
Here's another way to think about it: life as a game. You experience the world, interact with it, make decisions, accept missions, decline missions. You can't save the game. You can't load a previous save. Those options don't exist.
But you can work toward building something. You can work toward becoming someone. And what's a more interesting way to live than actually playing the game instead of sitting on the sidelines, keeping your options open, waiting for the perfect moment that never comes?
The game is happening right now. The clock is running. And the only way to play is all in.
V.
We're born, and in that same moment, we're given death. The clock starts ticking. What you do in between: the choices you make, the dreams you chase, the person you become. That's your life.
Not the time you spend existing. Not the years you spend in your comfortable fallback position. The time you spend actually living.
There is no safety net. There never was. The fallback was always an illusion, a story you told yourself to make the uncertainty bearable. But uncertainty is the only certainty. Change is the only constant. And the only direction is forward.
You can exist, or you can live. You can cling to your fallback, or you can let it go. You can spend your life preparing for the moment you'll finally be ready, or you can realize the moment is now. It's always been now. And it will never be more now than it is right now.
What are you waiting for? What permission do you need that you don't already have? What guarantee are you looking for that will never come? What fallback are you clinging to that's keeping you from the life you actually want?
The only fallback is going forward.
So go.